Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Pellet trained wild YP/SMB

My experience is wild caught YP do not learn to eat pellets as easily as bluegill. Consider yourself lucky if you can get wild perch from lakes to eat pellets. YP from a fish farm IMO will learn to eat pellets easier than lake caught perch.

One thing that can make it more successful to get YP to eat pellets is to have some type of teacher fish such as pellet eating minnows or sunfish "show" perch the location of the pellet feeding area. The perch are attracted to the activity of the pellet feeding fish and some perch could then try and eat pellets and thus become pellet trained. This happens because YP will eat some forms of snails. The hard body of a snail is similar to texture of a pellet thus the YP accepts the hard pellet especially true when the pellets are high quality protein with additives such as flavor enhancers. I think this same type of natural feed training behavior happens with the occasional largemouth bass.